Third World Plunge: Nearly 40 Percent of Americans Now Make Less than $20,000 a Year

The future doesn’t look very bright for America’s ever-dwindling middle class. The latest figures from the Social Security Administration (SSA) reveal that nearly half of the country now makes less than $28,031 annually, while nearly 40 percent of the population makes less than $20,000 per year, which is well below the middle-class threshold.

To give you a better idea of what this means: An individual working a full-time job at $10 per hour makes roughly $20,000 a year. Most $10-per-hour jobs are in sectors like retail or fast food, which means that nearly half of all working-age individuals in America today are flipping burgers or selling clothes at the mall just to make a living.

While some jobs have admittedly been recovered since the last recession wave, they are not of the same caliber as the jobs that were lost, based on this data. In other words, the jobs that were eliminated tended to pay more than the jobs that replaced them, a trend that continues as the economic state of America continues to decline.

“[I]t has been estimated that the jobs that have been created since the last recession pay an average of 23 percent less than the jobs that were lost,” explains Zero Hedge. “We are witnessing the slow-motion destruction of the middle class, and very few of our leaders seem to care.”